A data storage system may include multiple nodes, each of which is associated with one or more mass storage devices, such as an array of hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid state drives (SSDs). Although each storage device within a mass storage device may have a same nominal (or advertised) capacity, such as 1 terabyte (TB), each storage device within the mass storage device may, in fact, have an actual capacity (e.g., a raw or usable capacity) that is greater than or less than its nominal capacity. There may be a difference between the nominal capacity of the storage device and the actual capacity of the storage device for various reasons. For example, a vendor of the storage device may use a base-10 decimal unit of measure, interpreting 1 TB as 1000 gigabytes, whereas an operating system of the data storage system may use a base-2 or binary system to interpret 1 TB as being 1024 gigabytes (GB). This difference between nominal and actual capacities of the storage devices may lead to losses of efficiency in the data storage system when, for example, the storage devices are arranged into a redundant array, such as a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID), based on the nominal capacities of the storage devices. For example, if a storage device is selected for inclusion in a RAID configuration based on its nominal capacity, but turns out to have an actual capacity that is less than a required minimum capacity for the RAID configuration, the data storage system may exclude the entire capacity of the storage device from the RAID configuration. Thus, based at least partly on a difference between the nominal capacity and actual capacity of a storage device, a storage device may end up as a yield loss.